There’s a difference between someone being weird and someone being otherworldly and ethereal. On your first listen, you can probably guess what your feelings are going to be like about all of Die Hexen’s material on whether you categorise her work in the former or the latter. Whereas it’s not uncommon for other artists to encompass similar soundscapes to Manchester’s D Lucille, most try and add a certain pop edge to make these bizarre reverberations a little more accessible – but not Lucille, no way.

Other acts you could compare her to are Grimes – though without Boucher’s sometimes-kawaii, pop-culture edge – and the forever enchanting Zola Jesus. But there’s a certain distance in all of Die Hexens recordings that seems to draw the listener in more – as if these tracks weren’t recorded on a mac book in some Chorlton bedroom (probably) but were done so on some Lunar landscape (which would be impressive, given sound-muting qualities of a vacuum, but whatever)

Most interesting – for me at least – is that there is no-one in the region doing anything even remotely like her. The North – and the North-West in particular – is famous for rearing boys with guitars making indie music. It’s a curse, but one we have to live with. In D Lucille and her music, we have hope of a brighter future, a more challenging, interesting narrative waiting to be written by a woman and some difficult (but not unpleasant) synth.

Die Hexen plays The Angel Centre for Trash-O-Rama

On Sunday November 4th 2012, we teamed up with space creatures, art babes and long standing collaborators, the Volkov Commanders , to create a brand new concept event outside of our annual May Day Festival. Dreamt up over the long summer months, the result was a “ORBIT: A Show in Seven Parts”, a mysterious and magical walkthrough musical event that lent itself as much to live theatre as it did to music festival. This is the first showing of a short video made by Tobias Longmate that captures a little bit of the mood and atmosphere of the day.

Orbit featured specially commissioned one-off performances that saw DFA’s Planningtorock playing under a sea of blue light in St Philips Church, Ed Schraders Music Beat emerge out of smoke filled perspex box at Islington Mill, Queer’d Science attacked by naked test-tube dancers at the Old Pint Pot as well as fantastical and challenging sets from N. Racker, GNOD, Yola Fatoush & Tranarchy.

Along the way the audience moved as one, to the sound of a drum, from venue to venue, united together in an orbital journey knitted together by a series of narrative vignettes orchestrated by the Commanders. This included a mass, masked luminous box dance at the Salford war memorial, a candle lit waltz on the grassy knoll, the 20 strong Northern Quarter Boys choir singing David Bowie from the roof of St Philip’s Church with special silver moon heads and analogue amplifiers, a balloon-filled, saxophone dance within Islington Mill’s gallery as well as blue smoke signals filling the crisp, cold air of a magical night on the streets of Salford.

We would like to say thanks to everyone who helped make this event possible, particularly all the volunteers, the performers, Andy Salmon at St Phils, all at the Pint Pot, everyone at Islington Mill, Noisebox Sounds Productions, who stay faithful to the festival and all that we throw at them, the Arts Council, University of Salford for enthusiastically supporting the event and most importantly you, the audience.

Look out for news of another ‘Orbit’ and other special SFTOC events over the summer months

Transmission over

It’s going to be like the Eurovision Song Contest, but so so much better.

This is SceneSkype, an idea borne form a chance pun that’s got wildly out of hand. The dear folk from Manchester Scenewipe are lugging their AV equipment to the downstairs Islington Mill gallery space for some worldwide World Wide Web-based musical networking.

Modern Blonde are representing Manchester in this potential technological disaster. This does raise the question of why they can’t just perform in person, but Sounds From The Other City is on a bank holiday Sunday, so they might have prior commitments.

If their mammoth 22-track album ‘Home Truths’ is anything to go by, they deal in electro-cladded pop made for the pop-cynical and, I think, just the cynical; there are liberal swathes of sulkiness under the otherwise shiny exterior.

‘Plague’ is a microcosm of this. It’s all delirious dub-beats next to dolorous, droning vocals. You’ll dance though, promise. It’s incongruous electronica without the bits you hate.

I’m sure Modern Blonde intend to play some real gigs, but what’s the appeal of that? What the promoters save on the rider will probably be much better spent on some interesting lighting fixtures and a dry ice machine.

As we are in the habit of unwisely placing trust in puns, the only logical thing to do is to plug in your charger and embrace ‘Modem Blonde’: the original babes of the Skype music scene.

One of the later additions to the line-up, but we’re still mega excited about the though of starting out our day on May 5th with Fun Adults set at St Phil’s Church for Now Wave. This is the lead track from their new single for Handsome Dad records, and it’s milky and beautifu – people who enjoyed ALT-J’s set at SFTOC a couple of years back are well advised to turn up early to sample these before they start selling out Manchester Academy in the next couple of years

As much as SFTOC is an all-day festival, it’s also an all-night festival, too. Our afterparties have long since passed into legend – from the crowds at Islington Mill seeing the light of dawn and then carrying on dancing anyway, through to Underachievers drinking The Old Pint Pot dry – the same location DJ Q’s Classified will be playing for FAKTION this year. The bar should be a bit better stocked this year – hopefully, at least, given that Q’s new track has us more than hyped at the thought of going wild well into the wee hours. Have a listen – and read the press release – below:

DJ Q follows February’s ‘Trust Again’ with the second single from his upcoming debut album for Local Action.

Q’s been a legend to those in the know for almost a decade: his 2008 single ‘You Wot’ was one of the biggest tracks to ever come out of the UK’s bassline house / Niche explosion, and his BBC Radio 1xtra show was a must-listen for dance music fans worldwide.

His recent productions and remixes (for Local Action, OWSLA, Unknown to the Unknown and more) showcase a producer at the top of his game, and on the breakbeat-driven ‘Through the Night’ he continues to hone a blend of pop music and UK dance that very few others can pull off.

‘Trust Again’ was in heavy rotation from DJ EZ, Mosca, Brenmar, Sinden, The Wideboys and more, and ‘Through the Night’ will be just as big.

Treetop Flyers are some folk folks from London. They used to loiter around on the periphery of the Mumford/Noah and the Whale/Johnny Flynn scene, but as far as we can tell, have never been romantically involved with Laura Marling. How exactly this has impacted upon their musical career or creative output we will never be entirely sure, but as they have not yet been asked to headline Glastonbury, we’ll withhold judgment on the Marling factor and remain confident that a SFTOC slot offers with it loads more integrity.

Thus, next month, Treetop Flyers will be schlepping it up-country to ply their trade in Islington Mill for the ever-friendly sounding Hey! Manchester stage. Their presence sits nicely with a bunch of other singer/songwriter acoustic types, so we expect they’ll have a lovely day sat around drinking Drambuie and listening to Bob Dylan, or whatever it is that a gaggle of folk musicians do when they get together. Never let it be said that we’re not ones for community spirit.

With them, Treetop Flyers will be bringing material from their EP ‘To Bury The Past’ and album ‘The Mountain Moves’. From what we can safely deduce, this means a set full of unsquirmingly solid country pop. So like Dolly Parton, but not. Unlike their aforementioned Mumfordian peers, they indulge in the sounds of Americana, rather than get indulged by the moms of America. The track ‘Haunted House’ masters this musical incongruity, with particularly impressive Wild West movie vocals.

Then there’s the single ‘It’s About Time’, which features all the hats and hooks of a Californian hitchhiker, whilst remaining the underlying sense that whoever wrote it probably has to commute on the Tube everyday. Just wait until they see Salford.

In the last 12 months Post War Glamour Girls have built up a formidable reputation within Leeds ever creative music scene. Timeless in their approach, they spit desolate, often surreal narratives over literate rock and roll foundations, pitched somewhere between The Birthday Party if they’d hailed from England’s industrial North and the Smiths if their dissatisfaction had boiled over. Their energy and conviction mark them out as a band people can truly believe in.

This double A side single captures a young, fiercely intelligent band in their ugly element. ‘Jazz Funerals’ explores the fear of death and how we (individually and culturally) deal with the inevitable. In typical Post War Glamour Girls’ twisted style, it starts out with frontman James Smith envisioning his conception via “Some unforgettable action, In the back of a Datsun” before requesting that when he finally does meet his demise, his co-workers “Scatter his ashes by the coffee machine”. ‘Johnny and Mary’ is a beautiful succinct take on the Robert Palmer classic, taking its infectious synth melody and re-imagining it as a broken and gnarled fuzz guitar line. A fine tribute to a pop icon 10 years after his death.

There’s a really good back-story behind Occult Hand’s lexical inclinations, but by the time you’re reading this, you’ve probably already heard it and the novelty may already have been lost. If you’re really that interested in where they got their name from then you are more than welcome to do some research.

Isa Brooks and Henry Holmes are from Brighton and do dead crazy things like style their name ‘Issablood’, but just bear with it for the moment. They’ve deliberately shrouded themselves in the ubiquitous layer of mystique, but the discerning listener can seek out tracks ‘Rex’ and ‘Holy Water’.

The former stretches the definition of ‘track’ beyond all convention. Sinister static is punctuated by what sounds like someone reluctantly shifting furniture around a studio. It builds up all Hitchcock ‘Psycho’ style and disperses with a chilling lack of fanfare. The latter is marginally more songlike in the traditional sense, but don’t panic, it’s a more than suitably odd to satisfy any Halloween-twisted indulgences you may or may not have.

They’ll be bringing said oddities the Comfortable On A Tightrope stage in United Reformed Church. Arguably the best type of reformed church and indisputably the best setting for some nearly-satanic afternoon fun. We have it on good authority that their live show is something of a cross-legged spectacle too. They have been known to sit on the floor all séancey, backed by the type of projected images that come hand-in-hand with such weird wonders.

If you are not yet in correspondence with Letters To Fiesta, it’s probably just a matter of time. Despite being four upstarts with real day-jobs and such, they’ve got two shiny singles and a proper video to show for their efforts, and quite possibly have ambition and a real plan of action.

Be not swayed by the name. If you’ve ever been to a student battle of the bands night, you might assume that a band name that directs anything “To” anyone else tends to be saturated in regretfully-emotional sixth form poetry. Letters To Fiesta, gratefully, are not. Nor is it a reference to the sturdy but uninspiring Ford hatchback, which would make an awful muse.

It’s probably best if you avoid making any deductions at all. One would expect ukuleles at best, melodicas and boy/girl harmonies at worst. But apologies would be in order. They, in fact, sit at the intersection of electro pop and The Hysterical Woman from Victorian literature. Evidence of the latter is probably the work of Anna Lousie Etherington, who can sing like she was jilted at the altar 150-odd years ago.

Less hawkishly judgemental people will have most likely found Letters To Fiesta crop up in their existences through debut single ‘Mesosphere’. A track that – and this is said with all the gravity that the statement deserves – has more than a little Kate Bush running through its veins. It is tragi-pop enthused by the sort of synth delinquency that occasionally breaks into chart semi-stardom.

At the heels of ‘Mesosphere’ is ‘Statuettes’, a more sedate affair that justifies the folk comparisons they seem quite hasty to quash. There’s no shame in folk though, especially when there isn’t a Mumford for miles around and the vocals are as good as they are.

Letter’s To Fiesta will be proving awful, sceptical people like me wrong for Underachievers Please Try Harder @ The Crescent.

Given that it is this correspondent’s album of the year so far, and that his performance at SFTOC is just over a month away, one of the few ways to productively spend time whilst waiting to see Deptford Goth is to run through some of the words written about his debut album, Life After Defo. Hear what the fuss is all about below, too:

Bedroom production of damped down R’n’B is a crowded marketplace, yet you can’t help feeling that Deptford Goth brings something creative and exciting to it. In the same way as fellow London dwellers James Blake and Jai Paul‘s music does, this album interrupts the pounding monotony with a moment for reflection. When many of the market stalls have shut down early for the day, or indeed gone out of business altogether, Deptford Goth will still be reeling in interest and doing a roaring trade. Life After Defo is a truly captivating debut, with a poignancy that lasts far beyond the first listen.

The Line of Best Fit, 8.5/10

Sensitive, synth-nurturing young men of a delicate timbre were all over music a couple of years ago, and this saturation makes Daniel Woolhouse, aka Deptford Goth, a difficult sell: the music is dreamy, he’s pensive, and he sings as if he’s mortified at the thought of being overheard. Yet Life After Defo is a spectral beauty. Some of the wispier tracks – Bronze Age, Deepest – are too apologetic, and it’s at its best when it’s lean, rather than sparse. Union circles around a stuttering beat that springs to life with more than a hint of bombastic 80s pop, which makes its restraint elsewhere all the more elegant, while Guts No Glory has a touch of the xx’s reverberant charm. This is a lovely, gentle record; with some of those tentative edges smoothed away, Woolhouse could be a keeper.

Guardian, 4/5

Now with his debut, we hear the complete artist, inwardly analysing his soul through melancholic synth-pop and codeine soaked R&B. At the heart of it all our gifted lyricist churns out poetic verse; dark and magnificent on ‘Objects Objects’, religious and earthly on ‘Union’… with powerful juxtapositions of connection and disconnection, hope and despair, life and death, possession and loss throughout, ‘Life After Defo’ is an absolute thesis on pop experimentalism.

Clash Music, 8/10

Filling the pensive gap left in electronica when James Blake chipped off to make his second album, Deptford Goth revels in the same introverted melancholy. But where Blakey cracks already fragile hearts with rattling bass, enigmatic south Londoner Daniel Woolhouse’s approach is more delicate. Softly building from scant foundations, this is a record where subtle and restrained emotion is the driving force. ‘Guts No Glory’ is heartbreak played out over twinkles, while the hypnotic staccato of ‘Lions’ wrenches at tear ducts.

NME, 7/10

The key to this artist’s success is the consistency of his vision. Preceding singles Union and the title track might have painted a picture of pervading gloom courtesy of arrangements that crawled; but even within those downbeat previews resided whispers of optimism. Union, in particular, carries sanguinity beside somewhat sorrowful sonics.

BBC Music

Life after Defo occasionally feels like flicking through someone’s heartbreak diaries.

Q Magazine, 8/10